Bob visited with Joe at work and photographed along the coast while Margie and I headed north to meet Sally and Pam at the Maine Botanical Gardens for this years Garden Hoax. Words don’t do justice. It was misty (as all our garden events seem to be) giving the garden an ethereal feeling. We’ve been to lots of terrific gardens but this was different. It was a Maine Botanical garden. Where elsewhere beautiful flowers are planted to create vistas and swathes of color and texture, here the texture is of Maine. It is a garden in a forest.

Pam and I are in the rain in this pic Margie took
and House in the children’s garden with a cat fence!

Back to Margie and Joe’s for a bowl of home made chowder (what else) and the next day Bob and I headed north to Waldoboro where we stayed at the Blue Skye Inn, visited Pam and David, and ate Ginger Ice Cream in Thomaston (my mother has always raved of the Ginger Ice cream she ate in Thomaston, ME as a child in the 1920′s).

Alpaca

Bought alpaca from an Alpaca farm to card with some wool I have for spinning—this winter’s stress reducing project! and then home driving in one of this summer’s wild rain extravaganzas.

Short and sweet and lots of fun!

More fungi!

We had a great two days sitting on their porch over looking the pond and eating lobster at Abbott’s!

View from the log house!

Eating lobster with Senter and Bitty!

Today I Saw a Swan by Beth Emmott.

The center page is cut out with the two sided swan attached to a thread. The decorative corners of the pages are a nod to Victorian Cape May.

When we left we stopped at the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge which has wonderful wetlands which go right into the ocean. We hiked and photographed a bit, saw turtles, osprey and snakes.

As ever in that part of VA the quiet of the tall grasses and the beauty of the marshes is contrasted by the roar of the planes from the many military bases. My Dad was an air force test pilot and my Mom feels right at home. What others might find loud and jarring she finds quite wonderful and almost reverent.
The new header image is from Back Bay

Will be heading for IRELAND soon on a job/vacation. One of my clients, has an arts foundation in County Mayo and they want to increase it’s web presence so I’ll be meeting with the people there to get a feel of the operation and the area. Bob is coming as well as I want him to shoot video for it. We are going a few days earlier to do a little touristing in Dublin and on the west coast and then will stay in a cottage on the North Atlantic. Not to shabby.

Never been to Ireland, hope to see the Book of Kells and do some hiking. Then back as school starts the next morning. I enjoy projects like this (duh) for the obvious but also because the time spent working on it after I return is like my head is still there.

Don’t know if I will have much internet, certainly not in our cottage so that will take some getting used to but if I do, I’ll post about it.

Oh, never did get a fig tree.

next . . .

I didn’t know Fig trees would grow in Philadelphia!.

Born in 1699, John Bartram became America’s first great botanist and with his son William identified and cultivated over 200 new plant species. In 1765 King George III appointed John as Royal Botanist, a position he held until his death in 1777.

July 2010 storm damage of Historic 1790′s Yellowwood Tree.

Research has shown that this tree planted by John Bartram, has been damaged in previous storms and hopefully will recover.

Many plants are direct descendents of ones he cultivated, including one of his most well known, the Franklinia, (Franklinia alatamaha), he named it after his friend, Benjamin Franklin.

We have many works by these artists in Philadelphia, but to see so many all together, one after the other and more just around the bend . . . A garden of Art

Alexander Calder’s Five Swords and Mark Di Suvero’s Pyramidian

Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall and Alexander Lieberman’s Adonia

Isamu Noguchi’s Momo Taro and Kenneth Snelson’s Free Ride Home

New Beaver Pond in Connecticut.

Spent the weekend in CT visiting Senter and Bitty. They live in a log home over looking a wonderful pond and fields, where they have created a sort of sanctuary for lots of critters. Birds of all sorts, deer, wild turkeys, muskrats, frogs and, it seems, a beaver. Back in the back pasture, which Senter keeps mowed better than most front yards, off to the right is a small stream that beaver have dammed up, creating a whole new environment. Of course this required a trek through the woods to see it.

We also took a trip to the Fisher Museum at Harvard Forest in Petersham, MA to see their forest dioramas. That was more than a trek through the woods, but it was a beautiful day, through small New England towns. I had read about the dioramas when I was at the Arnold Arboretum a few weeks earlier with my garden gals. The dioramas were created in the 1930′s and are incredible. They have to be seen to be believed.

Later that day, my nephew, Senter, came for the weekend. He has a Mooney airplane which he gets serviced in NJ once a year. As he lives in Alabama, he used the trip as a chance to visit his folks. That was a bonus to the weekend we hadn’t expected.

On the way home on Sun we stopped at Storm King in NY for a few hours. I’ll save that for my next post. Right now I’d better get busy with work.

This year my garden friends from Moore College of Art went to Brookline MA outside of Boston. Visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Wed and the Arnold Arboretum on Thurs. Sally couldn’t make it as she had horsey things to do and Jane had to leave early Thurs but here are Mike, me, Marge, Jane and Pam at the Arnold on a rainy day by the Smoke Bush!

(Several people have asked me about the use of the word Hoax. It comes from a friend, Joe, who used it for a trip which was mainly for fun. Our garden trips are educational but the true purpose is to have fun together. I suppose, today, getting away to just have fun is a bit of a trick.)

We’re driving down the Delmarva peninsula and it is still cold, but I hear it’s already over 50 degrees in Virginia Beach. So that’s good! Here the ponds are frozen and the fields which will soon have green things growing are all brown and stubbly but the sky is full of birds in “V” formation—I wish flying to Canada but that won’t be until around March. Yeah, I know, in Philadelphia, I still have to deal with Feb. and March but the days ARE getting longer and stuff is starting to grow. Really!

Get’s me making plans for my garden— the catalogs have been coming for almost a month now and we have been having snows that melt slowly watering the ground so I hope there will not be any dry spells this summer to turn my world into a dust bowl.

My back yard has a place that needs seeding but other than that it’s pretty ok—just maintenance and veggies. But the front – under the living room window, is a shady place that is just a mess of pacasandra and a stunted azalea bush that need work. There’s a project to think about.

Or perhaps along the side walk—we could revisit that as well. I like to plant seasonal things along my way from the house to the car. Then, if I’m busy at work and don’t have time to wander my garden, I don’t miss the changes.